“I bet Ms Humphrey’s gonna give us another paper. Like, I'm done.” Valerie complained as she hauled up the coloured cardboards onto her shoulder. “We spent two weeks on this thing and we deserve a break. A real one. Not more research on the electromagnetic spectrum. Kathryn you okay?”
Valerie noticed her friend's unusual quietness. Kathryn had always been on the quiet side, but now she was hardly even responding to her. She had been staring at the pavement during the whole walk from the library, the two big bags of art supplies swinging from her hands. After a moment's pause Kathryn answered,
“I'm fine.”
“If you say so,” Valerie shrugged, unconvinced. “I wanna get some ice cream. There's a place at my house that sells the best peppermint chocolate chip. Wanna come along?”
Kathryn tried to avoid eye contact. “Valerie, I’m supposed to go back home, and actually, I'm kinda late…”
Valerie failed to hide her disappointment. “Really? Are you meeting someone?”
“Um, yeah…”
“Who, a friend?”
Kathryn gritted her teeth, worried about making Valerie jealous for the wrong reasons.
“Well, sort of… I guess you could say that.”
“Who's that friend?”
Right when Kathryn thought she was about to lose it, a golden blond lady in a navy blue raincoat popped up beside her.
“This friend,” the lady said cheerfully.
Kathryn wasn’t too startled. Valerie's eyes widened, surprised by the fact that one: the friend was an adult, two: the friend was so tall and still wore heeled boots, and three: Kathryn had any friends besides her. She finally decided to stop staring rudely at her and asked,
“You are…?”
“Clarisa,” the lady introduced warmly. “How Kathryn and I met was a complete accident. We were looking for volunteers back in our organisation and Kathryn seemed pretty fit for the job. We told her about it and she agreed to sign up.”
“It's a… charity organisation?”
“Something like that, yes,” Clarisa smiled. “We're supposed to meet every Tuesday afternoon to work on Kathryn's training. I just happened to be heading to her place. A wonderful coincidence that she's already out here.”
“Cool,” Valerie remarked, then began to scrutinise Clarisa's clothing. It appeared out of place for such fine weather.
“That looks a lot like a raincoat.”
“It is a raincoat,” Clarisa smiled as she looked down at the newly bought weather-wear. “I got it from a small store earlier and they ran out of bags. So I thought, why not just put it on? It looks decent enough anyway.”
Valerie glanced at Kathryn, then back at Clarisa, amused by the new stranger she'd met.
“I guess I'll… leave you both to do your training,” she waved before heading off to buy her afternoon dessert. “See you Kathryn!”
Once alone, Kathryn turned to the blonde, who was smiling after the schoolgirl.
“How did you pull that off?”
“What I said was true to a degree, was it not?” the smile deepened. “I did say I'd find another way to approach you.”
“Were you following me the whole time?” Kathryn suspected.
“Not the whole time, only about halfway through the journey.”
Kathryn frowned. She was tired of not knowing anything. She decided that she’d refuse to cooperate with Clarisa until she let her in on all the secrets.
“I have enough of this,” she came forward. “I want you to tell me everything.”
“How much is everything?”
“Everything everything.” Kathryn insisted.
“What do you want to know?”
“Lots,” Kathryn emphasised. She took a deep breath before spitting,
“What is a perceiver? What exactly can a perceiver do and what can’t they do? What is your organisation? What is your job? How did you know my name and where to find me? What exactly does the Darkness do and what does it want? What happens if I decide not to control my emotions? What are you hoping to achieve with me?”
Clarisa knew too well that Kathryn was as stubborn as a mule, and wouldn’t stop until she received at least a few good answers. But she didn’t want to miss this opportunity to probe further into Kathryn’s personal life. She smiled as she thought of a win-win situation.
“Alright,” she said. “I can’t promise that I have the answers to all of your questions, some of them I am unsure of myself. Neither can I promise to reveal everything that I do know, because some information is strictly confidential. I will tell you everything that is allowed to be disclosed to you, but on one condition.”
“Yes?” Kathryn said eagerly.
“That you share about what happened between you and your father, and about things you think might have led up to your depression.”
Kathryn pouted like a toddler whose lollipop had just been snatched away.
“No.”
Clarisa raised her eyebrows, waiting for her to change her mind. But she didn’t.
“No?” she repeated.
“No.”
Now that negotiation ended quickly. Clarisa maintained the policy that her clients’ privacy had to be respected.
“Alright then. Where shall we begin ‘training’?”
Kathryn’s eyes lit up. “You mean we can do it outside?”
“I don’t see why not. It’s a nice weather, and there’s a park nearby that’s pretty comfortable,” Her eyes landed on a street sign that pointed to Riverdale Community Park.
Kathryn shrugged indifferently. They strolled there leisurely and seated down on a wooden bench near the lake. Families were having picnics under the trees, the children running off to play at the swings. A cool breeze had settled in, and the two watched as joggers and dog-walkers passed them.
Kathryn broke the silence, with a reluctant, forceful,
“Fine.”
Clarisa smiled, knowing that a change of scenery often changed minds.
“But under one of my conditions,” Kathryn growled. “After today, I don’t want to hear you talk about it ever again.”
“I promise.”
“Not a single time,”
“Never.”
Kathryn frowned as she dug up the dreadful memories she had buried over the years. Each one presented itself with a difficult emotion, and she had to shove them aside in order to even begin with the story. With the feelings dusted off and the memories recollected in her mind in organised piles, she recounted in a shaky voice,
“When I was a girl about five years old, I saw my father with another woman. I asked who she was, and he said it was a friend. I started to see her whenever my mother wasn’t around, and I didn’t really care, because I didn’t know a thing at the time. It went on that way for another three years, until I saw them kiss. For some reason I thought that was interesting enough to tell my mom about it, and then everything went to hell. After the big quarrel, he abused me physically and verbally. He beat me up, destroyed all of my toys, and didn’t let me go out to play with anyone. He broke up with that other woman, but my parents fought every night from then on. Every day he said terrible things about me, about how I’ll never succeed in life, how I was ugly, how there was nothing good about me... I still think they're true, by the way. But all of that was tolerable until…”
Kathryn’s face reddened and her voice tremored to a stop. “I need to take a break,” she breathed, and Clarisa nodded understandingly. What she had heard so far was devastating, what could be worse? The scars beneath Kathryn's sleeves began to hurt again, but she clenched her teeth and forced herself to ignore it. She continued in a whisper,
“One night he came into my room, and after his routine of slapping and cursing me, he said he wanted to kill me. By then I was ten, and I thought he only said that because he was angry and drunk. But when he went out and I snuck into his room, I saw a freaking gun on his desk.”
Clarisa’s eyes widened in alarm.
“Did your mother know he kept a gun?”
“Never,” Kathryn’s face had now paled to the colour of a sheet. “I told my mom, she freaked out and we decided to move away.”
“In secret?”
“Yes.”
“Have you met him since?”
“No, and I don't wish to in my damn lifetime.”
Clarisa took a deep breath as she thought through the events.
“Do you think he might have caused your depression?”
“Probably, but now that he's gone I'm still as miserable as I had been,” Kathryn said moodily.
“Traumatic incidents usually take a while to move on from,” Clarisa reasoned. “Are there other things in your life that could have affected you? School, perhaps?”
“School's fine,” Kathryn mumbled. “It's just boring.”
“How is your relationship with your mother?”
“It's okay, although she worries a lot about me.”
“Do you have any friends?”
“Valerie, if she counts,” Kathryn said flatly. “We're not that close.”
“Does she know about what happened?”
“No, though she knows that I cut.”
Immediately, Kathryn regretted mentioning it. Clarisa noticed her unease and asked,
“Is something wrong?”
Kathryn finally let the pain show on her face and rolled up her sleeves. Liquid Darkness was bleeding from her new cuts. Clarisa pressed them with her hand to heal them again.
“You haven't stopped, have you,” Clarisa said rhetorically.
“I tried,” Kathryn uttered.
“How many more times did you see the Darkness?”
“When I cut,” she replied. “Which was once since the last session.”
Kathryn should be grateful that it hadn't manifested as anything else. Clarisa released her hand and the scars returned to normal.
“Kathryn, it's not a choice this time,” she told her severely. “You can't cut. It's dangerous.”
“I can't see the danger if I don't know anything about the Darkness,” Kathryn rebutted.
Clarisa sighed, because Kathryn had a point. The only thing that kept her from revealing the truth was the risk of hurting her. But Kathryn had to know about it sooner or later, they all had to. If anything went wrong she would just have to be prepared.
“As promised, I’m going to try my best to answer your questions,” Clarisa decided. “And like I said, not all of them. What would you like to know?”
“I think you mentioned this before but I wasn't really listening,” Kathryn brought up. “What’s the definition of a perceiver?”
“A perceiver is a human being that can teleport, communicate telepathically, turn incorporeal to other humans and see and manipulate the Darkness.”
“Okay, then why can't I teleport yet?” Kathryn countered.
“I thought you'd be excited about that,” Clarisa smiled broadly. “Every perceiver will develop their abilities at different times, some can teleport when they're six, others can only do it at eighty, though that rarely ever happens. Most perceivers should acquire all abilities by eighteen.”
“Wow, then I'm a late bloomer,” Kathryn remarked rather disappointedly. “Do you teleport all over the place? Or do you still take the elevators and stuff?”
“Technically we can teleport all over the place, but only if we have an image of our destination in mind. That means we can’t teleport to a place we’ve never seen before, unless there is another perceiver already there as a lead. Also, the distance we teleport is directly proportional to the energy we consume in our bodies,” she explained. “Besides, it would scare people, so we do it when no one's looking,” Clarisa winked.
For the first time Kathryn began to feel excited about being a perceiver. The list of things she could do with this power alone was already overflowing her mind.
“Do you still pay for concerts and amusement rides?”
“I do,” she said proudly. “Most perceivers don't, if they can get away with it.”
Kathryn smiled, wide, and Clarisa was glad to witness it for the first time.
“How did you know about me?”
“I didn't,” Clarisa said simply. “My boss assigned you to me.”
“And how did your boss know about me?” Kathryn expressed her annoyance.
“We have the ability to sense other perceivers, and if I concentrate hard enough, I can see your location.”
Kathryn shuddered. “So you can see what I'm doing twenty-four seven?”
“No, only your location,” Clarisa assured. “It takes plenty of effort to do even that, so I wouldn't prioritise stalking your whereabouts as a pastime.”
Now Kathryn wasn't so sure if she'd like to have those abilities.
“Do perceivers… live in a place where people can't find them?”
“We live separately in ordinary homes, if that's what you mean,” Clarisa replied matter-of-factly. “But we do have a building where our local headquarters is located.”
“Where is it?” Kathryn's eyes widened.
“That's classified at the moment. You'll get to see it later.”
“And when exactly is later?” Kathryn said impatiently.
“As soon as you complete your training, and when you have developed your ability to teleport.”
Kathryn stuck out her lower lip in frustration.
“It's an international organisation?”
“Yes. There's a branch in almost every country.”
“What is your job?”
“Our job is to complete the assignments given to us, most of them related to fighting the manifestations of the Darkness, and by that I mean complex and large-scale ones, so that people can hopefully live better lives.”
“Do they?” Kathryn said doubtfully.
“I'm sorry?”
“Do they really live better, happier lives?”
“For the moment, yes,” Clarisa replied plainly. “But then people mess up their lives all over again and the Darkness returns.”
“Wait I'm confused,” Kathryn slowed her down. “You said normal people don't see the Darkness. So what is the Darkness to them?”
“There's no right answer,” Clarisa shook her head and smiled, deciding to go full-on philosophical. “Some theories state that the Darkness is negative emotion, and that there is no difference between them beside the fact that perceivers can see them in physical form, while normal people can only feel them as what they are- emotions. Other theories say that the Darkness is an entity that is attracted to negative emotions. It feeds on them and only manifests physically if the emotions are powerful enough. There’s also a circular theory that sees it all as a cycle, the Darkness affecting you due to your negativity, and you feeling the negativity due to the Darkness. There are a whole bunch of other theories, and it really doesn't matter which way you think of it, so long as you agree that it's malevolent.”
“This is deep,” Kathryn remarked with a frown. “What do you believe?”
“I believe a little of everything,” Clarisa’s eyes twinkled. “It really depends on the assignment. It serves me to think of the Darkness in a certain way if it manifests in a certain way. I switch between theories all the time, to whichever one that helps me defeat it in a particular scenario.”
Kathryn nodded, amazed by the level of experience Clarisa displayed in her answer.
“What does the Darkness do, exactly?” she asked. “Why's it so dangerous?”
Here came the hard part. Clarisa decided that an analogy always worked best.
“What does depression feel like?” she asked Kathryn. “What would it look like to you as a physical object?”
Kathryn shrugged. “I don't know… It just… It kind of feels like an endless storm.”
She gasped in realisation.
“Is that… Is that why it's always raining in the living room?”
Clarisa shot her a worried look. “You mean the Darkness is there?”
“Not yet,” Kathryn assured, and Clarisa sighed in relief, “But you always behave as if the place is all wet when you enter, and then there was that thunder I heard last session, and what you did with your hands…”
“Yes, the Darkness manifests as a storm to represent your depression,” Clarisa confirmed, “And it can hurt you physically as soon as you develop the ability to sense it.”
“So you're saying it can kill me,” Kathryn cut to the chase.
“If you're not able to fight it, yes,” she verified darkly.
A spasm crossed Kathryn's face.
“Then shouldn't all depressed perceivers be dead by now?”
“It's my job to induct perceivers into the organisation and make sure they're trained to defend themselves against the Darkness, physically and mentally.”
Panic rose up Kathryn's throat. She shrilled,
“Then we'd better start training now!”
Clarisa agreed wholeheartedly, and was relieved that Kathryn valued her life after all. But no training course could start without a demonstration. She decided to implement the idea, the one that had been on her mind the moment she saw Kathryn's new scars.
“Definitely, but I think we should get ourselves a drink. I'm thirsty.”
Before Kathryn could stop her, Clarisa had gone over to the drink kiosk behind them. She returned with two cans of soda water, and held one out to her.
“You drink soda?”
Kathryn took the can hesitantly. “Yeah, I just didn't know you do.”
Clarisa silently laughed as she flicked her can open with her finger.
“Perceivers have the same anatomy as any other human, so yes, we do need to eat and drink.”
She held the can to her lips and poured the drink down her throat, so Kathryn didn't see why she shouldn't do the same. They savoured their drinks slowly, and Clarisa made sure that they were all finished before she called for Kathryn’s attention.
“Kathryn, I’m not sure if you can see this, but...”
Kathryn turned to her, and with the sharp edge of her empty aluminium can, Clarisa slashed hard on the underside of her own arm. A long, deep, diagonal cut was made, and Kathryn’s jaw dropped in horror.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Strangely, the cut did not bleed, and appeared only as a tear in her skin. Clarisa fixed her eyes on the cut and focused on the pain. It was her turn to dig up the ghastly memories of the past, the troubled teenage years, the nights she spent crying in front of the television with the news channel on, when a gunman was shown terrorising innocent civilians and shooting at children, or when a missile was launched and had gone off in a city. She recalled the boy who had found her in the darkness, held out his hand and steadied her into balance, how he fought off the monsters that haunted her, how he did the very same demonstration for her using a table knife. He taught her to battle her own ghosts, face her own fears, and even conquer them. He was a teacher, a friend, a lover, who asked for nothing in return. She remembered that night in the woods, where things seemed to be going so smoothly, as it had always gone the moment he stepped into her life. But then the winds came, and he collapsed beside the raging fire, and never stood back up again. She remembered how she called and called for his name, but he never responded, never answered the burning question of why he left her. Had he lost hope? She didn’t know. Had he enough of the Darkness? She didn’t know. Did he not want to be with her anymore? She did not know anything at all.
The skin around her cut had blackened and begun to peel away in paperish, black flakes, and Kathryn realised that they were ashes. The arm trembled as the area of torn skin grew. Kathryn bolted out of the bench and stared at the counsellor, who had tears stinging in her eyes.
“We all have a dark side,” Clarisa said in her quavering voice. “We all have things pulling us down, voices… telling us that we should give up, let go of hope and resign to the fate the Darkness has written for us...”
She inhaled deeply as the pain seared, not only in her arm, but in her heart. Kathryn felt a tight lump in her throat that she couldn’t swallow.
“And some go down that path, because it’s easy, to listen to what it tells us, to give in, and ignore the light that’s still shining in the distance, the light that takes effort to reach, because it’s so easy.”
A tear rolled down Kathryn’s cheek before those in Clarisa’s eyes spilled over. Clarisa took in another deep breath before staring at the hole in her arm with a different intention.
“But we have the power to choose,” she continued with a new strength in her voice, as she thought about the lessons Kit had taught her, and not about him. “We can take the harder path, but also the brighter path, because no matter how difficult the Darkness makes it seem, how painful it makes everything feel, it has no power over what you choose. And I choose hope.”
Slowly, the ashes folded back in towards the cut, and the pain began to fade. Clarisa finally looked at Kathryn and into her eyes.
“The darkest choice would be to ignore the light in the distance, give up on everything that could change for the better, and let go of everything you’ve ever dreamed of. Or instead, you can choose to trust the light that guides you, the people who love you, and the possibility that things will turn out alright.”
The ash-like flakes returned to its customary colour. Once the last bits of skin were back into place, crimson red blood began to ooze out from the cut, like how an ordinary wound would bleed.
She said with a faint smile,
“The choice is yours.”
Having witnessed Clarisa summon the Darkness with her own pain just to prove to her that it could be driven away, Kathryn didn’t know if she could admire and respect her any more. Without a second thought, the teen went forward and squeezed Clarisa tight in her arms. Clarisa closed her eyes and returned the hug, as far as her bleeding arm would allow her.
“You are not all the things your father said about you, Kathryn,” she whispered in her ear. “Always remember that.”
“Don't talk about him ever again and I won't think about him ever again,” Kathryn said, then looked up at Clarisa with bright, keen eyes.
“Can we start training now?”
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